House ready for bicam on Road Board abolition

MANILA, Philippines — The leadership of the House of Representatives served notice yesterday about its willingness to discuss with the Senate, through the bicameral conference committee, President Duterte’s order to abolish the graft-tainted Road Board.  

“We are positively responding to Senator Migz Zubiri’s call that the Senate and the House meet in conference to hammer out a better and genuine Road Board abolition bill,” House Majority Leader Rolando Andaya Jr. said.  

The House, he added, will soon be designating members of a contingent to the bicameral conference when both chambers resume session on Jan. 14.  

“Senator Zubiri’s proposal is the way forward, for both houses to jointly cure the bill of its defects, instead of carelessly sending to the President a flawed and faulty one, which does not offer reforms but more of the same bad practices,” Andaya also said. 

He stressed that the House wanted an “itemized spending (that) people can see,” referring to the billions of pesos generated from the Motor Vehicle User’s Charge (MVUC) that the board manages.   

“We will ensure that all proceeds from the MVUC form part of the General Fund. We want to strip MVUC collections of its status as a hidden off-budget item that will be spent by one person in an un-transparent way,” he pointed out.

 Andaya vowed to “heed the President’s guidance by crafting a version that will truly abolish the board and move the spending of MVUC collection from darkness into light.”  

“The House advocates the 100 percent dismantling of the Road Board. We do not want its powers to be merely transferred to three secretaries who will in effect be ‘Three Road Kings’ who can spend the MVUC at will,” he added, referring to the secretaries of public works and highways, transportation, and environment and natural resources.

He recalled that in 1998 he and Zubiri (then a congressman) opposed the passage of the law creating the Road User’s Tax, “which was aggressively pushed then by some people who are now in the President’s Cabinet.”

Zubiri, current Senate majority leader, said Congress is moving to retrieve from Duterte’s desk the bill that seeks to abolish the Road Board and to reconvene the bicameral conference committee to remove questionable provisions and come up with a fresh version. 

The bill as passed months ago by both the Senate and the House of Representatives did not really abolish the body but instead called for a new set of board members composed of the three government secretaries.

“We can recall the enrolled copies sent to Malacañang and re-convene the bicameral conference committee to further strengthen the abolition of the corruption-riddled agency,” Zubiri told reporters.

He said the Senate and the House can re-convene the committee upon the motion of both chambers on Jan. 14, “and meet for a day to simply craft the wordings to the law that will abolish the agency and revert the income and the funds to either the DPWH or the National Treasury.”

The Senate passed its version last February while the House approved a counterpart bill in May. The two chambers convened the bicameral conference to reconcile conflicting provisions of their versions of the measure. However, last September, upon the motion of Sen. Manny Pacquiao, the Senate decided to simply adopt the House version to hasten the transmittal of the measure to Malacañang and obviate the need to convene the committee. 

Zubiri said there are precedents on such a move, the most recent of which was with the Coco Levy Law that Congress recalled after sending it to Malacañang.

He said he wants the billions of pesos in MVUC collections included in the annual General Appropriations Act (GAA) to fund the Free Tertiary Education law and the anti-poverty measures.

The bill as passed by the two chambers retains the MVUC collections – estimated to be at P45 billion – as a trust fund or beyond the scrutiny of Congress in the GAA. It also mandates that 80 percent of the trust fund will be controlled by the DPWH secretary, 10 percent by the DOTr secretary, and 10 percent by the DENR secretary. 

It also creates a new spending criteria for garbage collection, waste disposal and solid waste program, which is seen to be contrary to the MVUC’s rationale that registration fees paid by vehicle owners should be spent for road transportation projects.  

The retention of 10 percent for the DOTr was also questioned by some quarters as the agency has been repeatedly hit for its poor absorptive capacity. 

Some lawmakers said it would have been better if the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority– not the DENR – was made a recipient of portions of the MVUC collections. – With Paolo Romero